Associate Professor: History of Science
and Atlantic World
Ph.D., Columbia, 2003
M.Phil., Cambridge, 1997
B.A., University of East Anglia, 1996
At Rutgers since 2008
104 Van Dyck Hall
James Delbourgo was born in Great Britain and educated at East Anglia, Cambridge (Christ's College) and Columbia, and previously taught at McGill University, Montreal, where he directed the program in History and Philosophy of Science. His research combines the history of science with imperial and global history and, most recently, the history and sociology of collecting and museums.
His first book explored the practice of bodily electrical experimentation in colonial British America and the early United States, including but moving beyond the figure of Benjamin Franklin, and assessing the larger meaning of the American Enlightenment through transatlantic and Creole scientific culture. Since then, he has co-edited two collections of essays: one on Iberian, French and British perspectives on science and empire in the early modern Atlantic world; and the other on the role of go-betweens in making scientific knowledge across the globe during the decades around the turn of the nineteenth century. He has also published essays on underwater collecting and Caribbean salvage diving in the late seventeenth century; on colonial Jamaican natural history, cacao and the invention of milk chocolate; on the use of Newtonian optical theory and anatomical dissection to theorize African skin color in 1740s Virginia; on the dyeing, novelistic and chemical projects of the loyalist spy Edward Bancroft in Dutch Guiana during the era of the American Revolution; a co-edited focus section in the journal Isis on the scientific use of lists in the early modern era; and a co-edited special issue of Annals of Science on the history and philosophy of species in early modern science.
Delbourgo has published essays in English, French and German, including articles on current art collecting practices in the Los Angeles Review of Books; on the history and politics of cabinets of curiosity in contemporary art, and the rise of 'clutterology' in the Chronicle of Higher Education Review; and on Benjamin Franklin and the Cold War origins of American science historiography in the Raritan Quarterly. A recent essay on the relationship between curiosity and slavery in wonder-cabinets and abolitionism appeared in the catalogue for an exhibition called "Assozitionsraum Wunderkammer" in Halle, Germany, featuring work by David Lynch, Lars von Trier and others. Delbourgo is a member of the editorial board of the journal History of Science.
He is currently completing a book on early modern global natural history collecting and the career of Hans Sloane, which culminated in the creation of the British Museum in 1753, the first national public museum in the world. The book examines Sloane's career from his background in Ulster to his voyage to Jamaica and his creation of a network of collectors who gathered curiosities for him throughout the world, through to the foundation of the British Museum. It draws on the histories of science, medicine and collecting, as well as Caribbean, imperial and global histories, and is based on extensive research in Sloane's surviving specimens, objects, manuscripts and catalogues in London's Natural History Museum, the British Museum and the British Library. The book will be the first study of Sloane in over 60 years, providing a major reassessment of his career and legacy, and will be published by Penguin in the UK and Harvard in the US and Canada.
Delbourgo's John Carter Brown Library exhibit on Sloane's Jamaica voyage, entitled "Voyage to the Islands," (2012) is viewable online.
At Rutgers, he is active in the Program in the History of Science, Technology, Environment and Health (STEH). With Toby Jones he is co-director of the RCHA program for 2012-2015, “Networks of Exchange: Mobilities of Knowledge in a Globalized World.”
His teaching includes Atlantic world history, history of science, collecting and museums, and the Enlightenment. In 2013, he taught a graduate colloquium on 'Collecting the World: Assembling Objects from Antiquity to the Present': read the syllabus here.
COURSES REGULARLY TAUGHT
- 506:251 Science and Society
- 510:321 Age of Enlightenment
- 510:340 British Atlantic World
- 512:103 Development of US I
- A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (Harvard, 2006).
- Science and Empire in the Atlantic World, co-editor with Nicholas Dew (Routledge, 2007).
- The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770-1820, co-editor with Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts and Kapil Raj (Science History Publications, 2009).
- "Whatcha Got?" Reviews in American History (2014): 690-696.
- "Atomic Franklin," Raritan Quarterly 33 (2014): 27-39.
- "Triumph of the Strange," Chronicle Review, 13 December 2013.
- "Art is For Lovers," Los Angeles Review of Books, 7 July 2013.
- "Introduction" and "Listing People," in "Listmania": Isis Focus Section (Dec. 2012): 710-752.
- "The Newtonian Slave Body: Racial Enlightenment in the Atlantic World," Atlantic Studies 9 (June 2012): 185-208.
- "Collecting Hans Sloane," in From Books to Bezoars (London: British Library Books, 2012).
- “Divers Things: Collecting the World Under Water,” History of Science 49 (June 2011): 149-185.
- “What’s in the Box?” Cabinet Magazine 41 (April 2011).
- "Sir Hans Sloane's Milk Chocolate and the Whole History of the Cacao," Social Text 29 (Mar. 2011): special issue on "interspecies."
- “Gardens of Life and Death,” British Journal for the History of Science 43, (Mar. 2010): 113-118.
- “Fugitive Colours: Shamans’ Knowledge, Chemical Empire and Atlantic Revolutions,” in The Brokered World, ed. Schaffer, et al. (2009).
- “Science,” in David Armitage and Michael Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, second edition (Palgrave, 2009).
- “The Electrical Machine in the American Garden” and introduction, Science and Empire in the Atlantic World, co-ed. Nicholas Dew (Routledge, 2007), 255-280, 1-28.
- “Slavery in the Cabinet of Curiosities: Hans Sloane’s Atlantic World,” website of the British Museum (2007).
- “Leviathan and the Atlantic,” History of Science 43 (Mar. 2005): 101-107.
- “Common Sense, Useful Knowledge, and Matters of Fact in the Late Enlightenment: The Transatlantic Career of Perkins’s Tractors,” William and Mary Quarterly 61 (Oct. 2004): 643-684.
- “Political Electricity: The Occult Mechanism of Revolution,” Common-Place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life 5:1 (Oct. 2004).
- Thomas J. Wilson Prize, Harvard University Press, for A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders, 2006.
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Standard Research Grant, “Beyond the New Atlantis,” 2005-2009.
- Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art Publication Grant, 2014.
- American Philosophical Society/British Academy Fellowship, 2013.
- Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Fall 2013.
- Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, Fall 2011.
- Rutgers University, Center for Cultural Analysis, 2009.
- University of Cambridge: Visiting Fellow, CRASSH, Lent 2008.
- University of Pennsylvania: Dissertation Fellow, McNeil Center, 2001-2002.